Thanks for posting this. Crichton was my favourite author when I was a young boy (I still remember how engrossing Sphere was for me) and to this day I had no idea that he tried his hand at programming.
Interesting - I greatly enjoyed Crichton's earlish work (e.g. Jurassic Park, Andromeda Strain), but found his later stuff to be terrible in its scientific basis and _Prey_ was when I stopped reading because I found it too terrible to just enjoy.
Glad someone enjoyed it, I may have been too picky.
His early stuff is excellent, but the last Crichton book that I enjoyed was Timeline. I found Prey to be disappointing and State of Fear was just about unreadable with its complete misrepresentation of climate change science.
If it makes you feel any better, I followed the exact same path. He was one of my favorite authors when I was a kid, but by the time Prey came out... yeesh.
But I still love Sphere, The Lost World, and so many more. I even love Disclosure, with its hilarious take on virtual reality file storage.
Micro, his last novel, was utterly, truly dreadful. But it was posthumously completed by another author (Richard Preston, who wrote The Hot Zone, which I really enjoyed, in a freaked-out way), so I don't know where the blame should lie.
It's so dirty and underhanded. He seemed like a really interesting guy from the window of his books. Perhaps he just got a little off track at the end there.
Giving a bad guy's background in a fiction novel a similar some similar traits someone you don't like for openly being critical of your work is "so dirty and underhanded"? This feels utterly backward.
If you gave me the option of:
A) Having a person publicly criticize my work saying things such as: "I found a man who has long yearned for intellectual stature beyond the realm of killer dinosaurs and talking monkeys"
B) An author will write a d-bag into one of his novels and say he went to the same college and works in the same field as me.
A) is forthright. Standing up and saying, "hi, i'm bob, and joe sucks" is clear and unambiguous.
B) is an underhanded rhetorical trick. "Hi, i'm bob, let me tell you a story about Moe. For convienence, Moe looks talks and acts just like Joe. Moe is a child molester."
See, there's this internal conflict, either the mythical Moe is just like Joe, and Joe is a child molester, or Moe isn't just like Joe.
Just stand up and say Joe sucks. Leave Joe out of the story you're trying to tell.
It's ludicrous to even think of this as an "attack". Just sounds like some conspiracy theory based on this guy's insecurity. Let's say Crichton did mean to use this as an attack. How did it hurt this critic guy? After all, no one would have recognized that it was him if this guy didn't go through all the trouble to come up with his "theory". Even after this guy wrote this blog post, how did this theory hurt him? Based on what you say you did, it just sounds like it was Crichton who's the casualty from this event. Lastly, I think it's stupid to stop reading an author just because of something like this. Let's say everything on that post is true. (Although it only sounds like this guy's theory) Even then this is just some childish personal behavior you can laugh over (It's not like Crichton attempted to bury this critic guy with "underhanded" tactics), it has nothing to do with his ability to write good books.
Regardless of how rational it is, sometimes the reality surrounding a person can affect the interpretation of their work. For a while, it was hard for me to really enjoy watching Tom Cruise, even though I knew his personal life didn't really matter for my enjoyment of his performance. Eventually I got over it.
I've never doubted it was meant as an attack on Michael Crowley, but Crichton wasn't the first storyteller to insult a real person. From over-the-top portrayals of whoever happened to be the US president when a book or movie was written (e.g., the "difficult president" referred to in Harry Potter), to more personal attacks, there's a long history of writers trying to prove the pen is mightier than the sword. Some of the attempts end up in Literature classe, like portions of Dante's Inferno.
I'm as big of a Crichton fan as they come, but I don't understand how someone can discover that he put this passage in his book (likely to take an underhanded shot at the critic, but if not, to what end?) and not have a lower opinion of him as a person. Either it was a really, really low insult or a pointless and gratuitous story of raping a toddler. I'm not even sure which is worse.
Amazing science fiction author, but possibly not a great person. Those can both be true.
I don't think it is dirty and underhanded, and I would even go so far as to say it's awesome.
It isn't like Chrichton defiled some serious work of journalism or science by slipping in this personal vendetta; as Crowley aptly points out, Chrichton's works are mass-market novels about 'killer dinosaurs and talking monkeys'.
So what's the harm? Books like that need despicable minor characters to set the tone, and I think this is perfectly fine way to say, "Fuck you, Michael Crowley!" It's his novel, after all.
Also, after reading Crowley's article[1] that so incensed Crichton, I think he probably does have a small penis^W^W^W^W^W^W^W it is not very good. (Neither are Crichton's books, although I probably read most of them in the pre-kindle days when you had to buy a paperback at the airport before a long flight.)
No, let me give you a true example of ridiculously over-the-top, zero subtlety.
I once read an obscure sci-fi novel where the bad guy was an evil physicist named Edward Teller, who wanted to destroy the world with his invention, the hydrogen bomb. No relation to the real-world Edward Teller, of course. All characters in the novel were fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, was purely coincidental. It said so right in the front of the book...
I remember reading Timeline and Prey in high school. They were amazing books to me at the time. I just couldn't put them down. I never cared too much about how scientifically accurate they were though. That's like complaining about the plot holes in Back to the Future. It's entertainment, so to me he did his job well.
Well for me (and I presume at least some other people) bad science in works ruins the entertainment value.
For example, if in an otherwise realistic military thriller, the hero finds the runway blocked by a tank, so he throws his F-16 into reverse and takes off backwards, that would completely take me out of the story, destroy the suspension of disbelief, and ruin (or at least severely degrade) the book.
Some of Crichton's books do that for me, as does almost every movie in which they use computers, and the computers are all like, bleep-bleep-bleep-bleep-bleep!whzzzzt! and sounding like R2D2 with every normal user interface action, such as scrolling text and opening windows.
I loved "State of Fear" because he overtly used the techniques of propaganda almost as a parody. Don't know why, but that was just deeply entertaining.
But I also share his concern with the politicization of science.
I read "State of Fear" about two years back. The novel (story line) was very interesting. And it convinced me for a while, that 'climate change' is over-rated and a lot of propaganda.
I remember his protagonist, scientist who is busting the myth/propaganda in the story, lives in a 900 sq ft. home. Juxtaposed against the lavish life style of those who are propagating 'climate change'.
Crichton is a writer who takes a very macro view of the timeline. Lets not forget, he wrote Jurrasic Park, and hence the entire franchise owes him that credit.
In this book, he says that this micro environmental changes, don't matter when compared to macro stuff like Ice age, which happens every some 10,000s of years.
Also he gives a lot of data in the book. For e.g. Historical temperature charts of various cities etc. to make his case of 'climate change' being over-rated & driven by ulterior motives, than substantive in itself on merits to call such a drastic action.
I am just a layman on this. But truth be told, the book did impress me at that time. Which is not a long time ago. And please understand, I am totally not a nutcase who denies science.
I recently went back and reread Jurassic Park. It was still an exciting story, but Crichton's strongly negative view of science and scientists shone through brightly to me now. It's really quite shrill in parts.
That seems to be a common issue with novelists who have big ideas. Too many loose strings, brain stack overflow.
For example, I'm not terribly fond of the way Stephen King ends his stories, especially the longer ones. J.K. Rowling also always seems to hurry too much at the end of her books. And both are much better writers than Crichton.
I remember when someone posted here their javascript project demonstrating how you could make ads and modals pop up when the user's mouse left the page. There were a lot of comments about the potential for abuse, but ultimately it was decided that like all science it could not be inherently evil.
Still, I sometimes wonder if they feel any remorse.
According to the Wikipedia entry on Michael Crichton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton), he actually told another professor about his suspicions, and more importantly his intention to submit an Orwell essay under his own name. If he were to get caught, informed consent from another member of the faculty may have been a mitigating factor.
In college, I feared taking English classes. The only courses I feared more were Public speaking courses. I really feared public speaking, but that's another story. I knew my grammer was horrid, and I just wasen't interested in writing.
I was interested in science--and girls?
Well, I remember this one English 101 instructor. No one in the class could please this guy. His favorite saying was, "I don't grade on the curve, because I've had too many stupid classes!" We all nervously laughed, but we were scared. Everyone seemed to try, but all our papers were given back with so much red felt tip graffiti; everyone just wanted to get through his class. We just wrote short choppy sentences, and tried to keep the grammatical errors down. He once had the nerve to say, "Most of you are passing, but your papers are so boring!" I remember thinking, whenever we get slightly creative, you beat the hell out of our papers? I personally think he would have liked to fail all of us, but he didn't have tenure? Well I got through class, but with some horrid memories.
Well, I needed four, or five (He taught us to write out numbers under 10. I'm still not sure about that, but do it out of fear) English classes in order to graduate. I took all the courses in my last semester of college. My other instructors were great. This one guy scared me so much, I just figured everyone in the English department was like this guy. Well, they weren't.
The other instructors were great. They weren't easy, but sincerely wanted to help. I had one instructor tell us I've met very few natural writers. It's a craft. Yes, like woodworking. (It wasn't a cliche back then.) I'll always remember that advice. Plus--he told us his personal story. When he was in school he hated writing, but with the right training, and encouragement, he went from a science major, to a Engish major. I think he had a PhD, but didn't want us to call him doctor. He had such a thick Indian accent, I really had to pay attention in class, but learned more in one week in his course than all the rest. I forget his name, but I remember him saying, "My name rhymes with Desi--from the Lucy show." He was a really good person/teacher.
"The book features relatively new advances in the computing/scientific community, such as artificial life, emergence (and by extension, complexity), genetic algorithms, and agent-based computing."
Not remotely pioneering though. Being 5-20 years (or more) behind the curve might be insightful to the average reader, but is in no way pioneering.
That'd be like saying Dolly the Sheep was pioneering in ideas about cloning humans. The ideas/ethics/concerns were around for decades. That average people willfully ignored them doesn't make the ideas new.
For what it's worth, when I was a kid, I loved Prey and it was my first experience with nano-technology. You only have to be pioneering to the right audience. ;)
Disclosure! Yeah, the one that became the movie with Demi Moore and Michael Douglas. A man is sexually harassed by his female boss.
The book is kind of about that, but also about technology. It was published in 1994 and I would say it was futuristic, if not a bit misguided.
Crichton envisioned a virtual reality tool where -- if you wanted to find a certain file on your computer -- you would run down the halls of a huge virtual library, opening virtual filing cabinets and picking through files by hand. I think this was supposed to make finding your digital files "easier"... but seems hilarious now.
Who knows, maybe some version of that will still come true. It's been a while since I read it, so I might be mis-remembering.
Almost all of his books had some futuristic technology involved, including Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, Timeline, etc.
I don't remember much about the plot, but can't ever forget that VR. <curmudgeon>The trends in "expressive" animated interface design make me think that dystopian future is still an aspiration for some designers. Just as soon as we all get headsets...</curmudgeon>
We might not have to traverse miles of virtual hallways, but a lot of designers still seem to prefer to make us flick our fingers a lot. Each of us probably scrolls through hundreds of feet of virtual space every day. Before long, we'll probably begin to hear about whatever the index finger equivalent of carpal tunnel syndrome is.
But at least we don't have to swing our arms in midair for 8 hours a day like the poor folks in Minority Report.
This is a chance to bring up my favourite Westworld scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_jW-C_G6Pk . As a depiction of computer worms causing industrial chaos this is pretty prescient, because it's from 1973, two years before The Shockwave Rider and predating all but the very first signs of self-replicating mischief in the real world or CS research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_virus#Historical_deve... . (It's clear that Crichton the doctor had an analogy to human disease and medicine in mind https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7Dq7vqpGCM .) But it's also a great example of how real life is stranger than science fiction (as William Gibson likes to discuss). In the 1973 future the Chief Supervisor of Delos suggests that the resort is being attacked by a software worm and his fellow engineers find the very concept hard to take seriously; in the present day they'd just groan and ask "do you think it's the Chinese [government]?"
Also, the Gunslinger vision https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jCDQvNh85Y mentioned in the article isn't just the first use of CGI in a feature film, it's surely also a very early, for all I know maybe the first, attempt to show the "first-person view" Umwelt of an artificially intelligent robot.
Computers were at the core of Jurassic Park. Remember, the novel was published in 1990.
Among other important uses:
* the widespread use of computers for nearly complete automation of the park--maintaining feeds (to a certain extent), automatically delivering medicine, etc. These systems were buggy, but it was a major early demonstration of how computers could be used to automate out many jobs.
* Think the Internet-of-Things but for tracking hundreds of dinosaurs in xyzt space around the park using image recognition from hundreds of distributed sensors/cameras around the park.
* They had several Cray XP supercomputers in order to help with DNA sequencing.
* Ian Malcolm studied chaos theory--a field that is reliant on numerical simulations (rather than pure pen-and-paper calculation).
As a slight spoiler to the book: human hubris in building incredibly complex biological systems under the control of relatively simple technological systems is what led to the downfall of the park.
If you want to find out more about him read his book Travels, is a very interesting take on an autobiography type novel. Its one of my favourites but I don't know anyone else who's read it.
That was a fascinating book, all right. The idea that the author of the hyper-rational The Andromeda Strain could be so credulous is still something I struggle with. He comes across as someone who automatically believes anything suggested to him until it's proven wrong.
There were at least two people inside Crichton's head, maybe more.
For someone so concerned with the future, he was (for my tastes) entirely too instrumental in working against a viable future for humanity. I'm referring to his public support of Jack Inhofe's climate change denial. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/michae...
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